© 2023 Concerned Citizens of Western Montana

Note:  when we refer to the “Tribe” in any of our articles, such reference is intended to be the CSKT tribal government corporation, and not individual Indians or tribal members.  With the exception of their “membership in the tribal corporation” we consider tribal members to be separate and distinct from their government, as are we from our own corrupt governments.  In follow up to the article we recently posted titled Life, Liberty, and Property, we ask you to consider the property rights of the individual CSKT tribal members as articulated below.  

In light of the current state of the United States government, we respectfully write this article in consideration of our tribal friends and neighbors.  It is not our goal to speak for them, but rather to speak out of respect for all they have been through, via the tribal corporate entity that governs them.    

For through their “membership” in the corporate tribal governance structure created by the federal government in the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, the tyranny of their government has been out in the open far longer than our own.

Notwithstanding the fact that in 1924, tribal members were made citizens of the United States, their tribal identify binds them to the chains of the Indian Reorganization Act through their communist form of tribal government.     

It is a government that through its federal government trustees and attorneys, also seeks to place similar chains upon non-members, via federal and state legislation such as the Flathead Water Compact. 

In past articles we’ve discussed the fact that the Confederate Salish and Kootenai Tribes were the first tribe in the country to sign on to the Indian Reorganization Act.  

CSKT in Time Magazine

CSKT in Time Magazine: Source: Hearings before a subcommittee of the committee on Indian Affairs United States Senate 76th Congress, Part 37. The magazine Time of the November 11 issue carries an interesting illustrated article, showing Secretary Harold L Ickes of the Interior Department signing the first constitution and bylaws under the noted Wheeler-Howard Reorganization Act; while back of his desk are grouped Mr. John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and six elder Flathead Indian chieftains from Montana.

The CSKT tribal government corporation was chartered in 1935.

Almost immediately after the Congressional ratification of the IRA, Burton K. Wheeler, the sponsor of the IRA legislation sought to repeal it, asserting that the Indian Reorganization Act encouraged expansion of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, subverting the efforts of American Indians to achieve independence from federal oversight and control.   Unfortunately Congress never acted to repeal it.

In 1940, Alice Lee Jemison, a Seneca Indian and President of the 6th Division of the American Indian Federation, testified in Congress for the repeal of the Indian Reorganization Act.  She testified that the sole purpose of  their organization was to secure for all Indians the rights, privileges, immunities and responsibilities of free-born American citizens.      

Here is an excerpt from her powerful testimony that spoke directly to the situation in which Native Americans whose tribal governments have been “reorganized” as federal government corporations under the Indian Reorganization Act, find themselves. 

House of Representatives, Committee on Indian Affairs, Washington, DC

S.2103 Howard Wheeler Act – Exempt Certain Indians

Excerpt from the June 1940 testimony of Mrs. Alice Lee Jemison:

SUMMARY

My reasons for being opposed to the so-called Wheeler-Howard Act and in favor of the bill S. 2103, which will exclude certain Indians from it, are as follows:

  1. It is contrary to the 150-year-old policy of the Federal Government because it seeks to keep or take back into a tribal status all the lands of the Indians and thus place it in a status where the Supreme Court cannot take cognizance of what is done to it or with it, by either Congress or the Indian Bureau. As soon as title to property vests in an individual (the courts have held that such title does vest when the Indian has selected or accepted or even just filed for allotment, whether or not a patent-in-fee is issued), the courts can then take cognizance of that land under the usual laws which apply to any other property. It certainly cannot be considered a step forward to keep these lands in a tribal status and thus under the dictatorial rules of the Congress, and through it the Indian Bureau, with no right of appeal to the courts for relief from any legislation affecting that property. Such a step is distinctly a step backward.
  2. All Indians who voted to accept the so-called Wheeler-Howard Act unwittingly changed their legal status from that of “involuntary wardship” to that of “voluntary wardship.” No one told the Indians this before they voted. Thus they accepted the bill through misconceptions. No one explained to them that when they came to Congress to ask that this act be repealed or changed that they would be told, “Well, you voted for this and by that vote you agreed that the Secretary of the Interior should retain control over your affairs forever.” I dare say the majority of them voted upon accepting the act without ever seeing the act itself and with only the glowing promises of the Bureau that they could borrow money to build homes, go into business, buy land and educate their children, to guide them in a momentous decision which affects their lives and property in that it changed their legal status.
  3. There is no self-government in the act, all final power and authority remains in the Secretary of the Interior, which is exactly where it always has rested heretofore. The act provides increased power for the Secretary of the Interior in the mandatory provisions for control of grazing and timber operation.
  4. It does not provide land for landless Indians, as was promised. It merely provides land for the “use” of the Indians, as long as they do not offend the Bureau, and this in itself increases the absolute and autocratic control which the Bureau exercises over these helpless wards.
  5. The act legalizes communism on Indian reservations, in that it provides only one form of living for the Indians, communal living, with all property, both real and personal, held in common, and that it is being administered to destroy the rights of individual enterprise, private property, inheritance, free speech, free press, free assembly, and trial by jury, and that Indians are being encouraged to defy State laws.
  6. The act has caused more hatred, strife, and turmoil among the Indians themselves than anything which has heretofore happened to them. The act itself and the campaigns conducted among the Indians to secure approval of them has aroused the dying embers of race hatred among the older Indians; has served to emphasize to all Indians that they are Indians, separate and apart from other Americans, instead of teaching them that they are Americans, the same as all other races and nationalities which live in the United States; has widened and increased the gulf between full-bloods and part-bloods; has disturbed the peaceful relations of tribes who occupy reservations jointly; has broken up life-long friendships, caused divorces between husbands and wives, and set children against parents and vice versa.

In conclusion I want to say this:

In 1934 Congress exercised its autocratic, dictatorial powers over these helpless ward Indians by enacting the so-called Wheeler-Howard Act, over the protests of many Indians, and by that action compelled these wards to vote upon this proposition without making adequate provision to protect the Indians from the Bureau in the elections or to insure that the Indians fully understood exactly what they were doing when they cast a ballot for or against the act.

On the contrary, Congress provided the Bureau with ample funds and facilities to campaign for the act, and all opposition campaigns had to be carried on at the expense of individual Indians, most of whom were verging on starvation. Much misery among the Indians has come from this act. Indians have been brutally beaten, jailed, fined, denied work, or removed from their work because of opposition to this act.

Congress had the ability to repeal this act, yet they willfully chose to ignore the concerns of tribal members that bravely stood up against it.  By doubling down on the deplorable situation that Congress placed individual Indians in, Congress turned their back on them.

What Ms. Jemison may or may not have realized at the time, is that the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) had quite effectively finished the job of stifling individual Indian voices.

This was demonstrated throughout the hundreds of pages of testimony at these hearings when Senators and Representatives consistently queried Indians about their “authority” to speak, and to determine whether they represented the newly formed tribal government corporations that the IRA legislation had authorized.

In the end, it mattered not to Congress that some tribes showed support for a full repeal of the IRA legislation, or that testimony showed that the government’s effort to sell the reorganization act misled Indians into voting to accept it without understanding its implications.

Additionally, the litanies of corrupt activities by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and their own Tribal Councils were also of little interest to the Senators and Congressmen who heard these testimonies.  If any investigations were to be done anyway, they most likely would have been assigned to those who may have facilitated the corruption in the first place.

Many tribal council government corporations, created under the authority of the IRA, opposed any efforts to repeal the act.  Despite the fact that testimony indicated that many tribal council members were on Bureau of Indian Affairs payroll, Congress willingly turned a blind eye to the plight of the very people their policies were supposed to “protect”.

We can reasonably argue that the IRA upended any federal government notion of a trust responsibility for individual Indians and instead replaced it with a trust and financial responsibility only to federally chartered tribal government corporations.  In the same sleight of hand, this act also made individual Indians wards of these new tribal and arguably communist government corporations authorized by the act under the guise of “self-governance”.

The passage of the Indian Reorganization Act set the stage for the problems that exist with both the Indian and non-Indian citizens living in western Montana today.

We are all endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights, so how is it that the federal government thinks it can pass legislation that deprives tribal members of those rights?  

In a country founded upon the principle that all men are created equal, why isn’t the notion of any kind of trust or ward status of individual Indians repugnant to every American citizen?

 

Additional Information:

Were you aware that in 1936, the individual tribal members of the CSKT, the first tribe to sign on to the Indian Reorganization Act requested that the Federal government to repeal it?  See this article for more information:  An Amazing Flathead Indian Woman.

To see the original series of 2020 articles on this subject reference these links:

1934 Individual Indian Repression Act?

Corporate Charters and Constitutions Under the IRA

1940 Alice Lee Jemison Closing Testimony

Below are the original “federally approved” Corporate Charter and Constitution of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

1935 Approved CSKT Constitution and Bylaws

1936 CSKT Corporate Charter

CSKT Constitution and Bylaws from the state of Montana Indian Law Portal

 

Follow our blog

If you’d like to receive email notifications when we post something on the blog here’s how to do it:

To Follow the Blog:  While on any page of the blog, you will see a list of recent blog posts on the left side of the page.  Scroll down to just below the articles and you will see a section that says:

Follow the Western Montana Water Rights Blog via Email.  Enter your email address and click the button that says FOLLOW.

It’s that easy!